I've just been reading through the most commonly asked questions page on this site and the responses posted by Rebecca. Already I've come across 2 statements that are simply not true.

1. It is possible to affect physical reality and your body in a lucid dream, such as healing yourself or someone else in a lucid dream, as well as to receive previously unknown and verifiable information. I know this to be a fact from personal experience. You may not be able to learn Icelandic, but you can learn and do things that affect physical reality.

2. To state as fact that there is no real evidence for telepathic dreams is misinformation. Once again, personal experience has taught me that there are indeed telepathic and precognitive dreams. I've written about lucid dream healing and telepathy from my personal verifiable experience, not from a story told me by a "friend of a friend."

http://ancientomnivore.com/zzzz-lucid-dreaming/

Lucid dreaming is an ancient spiritual practice and a fascinating mystery and to define and/or limit its boundaries and possibilities with pat statements does not do it justice and is no way helpful.

Most of the information is personal views and opinions and as such are not provable and have a big element of belief involved. This makes it very hard to set anything in concrete and I look it from the point of view that it is personal and we need tolerance for anyone with an opposite view. That said it is a very interesting area of discussion and experience and look forward to your posts.

Who are you I asked, the reply "dont be silly, we are your daughers" many years before they were born

When I'm reading something written by someone else... I always take the stance that Peter mentions, that it's only their opinion. Hopefully it's an opinion based upon actual, direct experience though.

Direct Experience > anything else.

Take for example, your experiences MariaPita. You have direct, first hand knowledge that you can affect physical reality via your non-physical exploits. That's solid information.

In the end, the most any single person can tell you is information from their own experiences... the most anyone who is reading those experiences can do is "believe" or "disbelieve" them. It takes having their own experiences before an individual can "KNOW".

GI Joe really had it correct when they said, "Knowing is half the battle"... but then again, I guess it should be, "Knowing is the entire battle, but you can only KNOW through direct experience".

I think the initial comment that statements previously made 'are just not true' is just as dogmatic as the opinion you are trying to disagree with. We all need a free discussion of experiences and tests that have been performed and less opinion stated as fact. In the realm of lucid dreams it is too early to be stating certainties. Your conclusions may be right, but should be fair subject for critical discussion.

I know for a fact that number 1 is true because of personal experience.

In regards to number 2,

I once had a false awakening where I woke up in some strange room and seen a massive spider above my bed. When I woke up for real I switched on the computer and the first piece of news was about an Indian village that had been attacked from spiders and it looked the same as the one in my dream.

Now I accept that this is purely coincidence, but the fact is we don't know much about how the world works apart from what science tells us. Telepathy could be true, or not. Who knows.

I think if you read about anyone's experiences you should attempt them before you make judgements. I know I'd never tell someone something I didn't think they'd be able to do because I would look like a fake and a fool if it couldn't be verified.

MariaPita wrote:I've just been reading through the most commonly asked questions page on this site and the responses posted by Rebecca. Already I've come across 2 statements that are simply not true.

1. It is possible to affect physical reality and your body in a lucid dream, such as healing yourself or someone else in a lucid dream, as well as to receive previously unknown and verifiable information. I know this to be a fact from personal experience. You may not be able to learn Icelandic, but you can learn and do things that affect physical reality.

2. To state as fact that there is no real evidence for telepathic dreams is misinformation. Once again, personal experience has taught me that there are indeed telepathic and precognitive dreams. I've written about lucid dream healing and telepathy from my personal verifiable experience, not from a story told me by a "friend of a friend."

http://ancientomnivore.com/zzzz-lucid-dreaming/

Lucid dreaming is an ancient spiritual practice and a fascinating mystery and to define and/or limit its boundaries and possibilities with pat statements does not do it justice and is no way helpful.

Hi Maria

I'd just like to clarify, your first claim refers to the statements I made in this article:http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/can-you-modify-your-body.html

Specifically:

Now, there is just one caveat to my "anything's possible" theory, and I must be clear about this: it only applies to the dream world itself. You can't pass impossible achievements or take physical changes across to the real world.

For instance, I'm often asked if you can learn a new language in a lucid dream? Certainly, you can practice your existing knowledge of a certain language and wake up with better language comprehension. But you can't attain brand new information that you didn't already know. So if you've never heard or studied Icelandic, for example, it is impossible for you to learn new Icelandic words in a lucid dream.

And your second statement (I'm guessing) refers to my homepage:http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/

In which I explain why I think psychic dreams aren't real:

I'm sure you want them to be, but wanting something doesn't make it real. Otherwise we'd all look like A-list celebrities and solve world poverty.

To date, there is no good scientific evidence for psychic dreams. Everyone has heard of a friend-of-a-friend who "had this amazing psychic dream, so it has to be real" but please bear in mind that such stories are often embellished, and coincidences do happen. Also, consider this:

1) Nobody has identified a mechanism for psychic information to travel from the future into your dreaming mind. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it's a tad premature to believe in something we can neither perceive nor explain.

2) It's far more likely that so-called psychic dreams are caused by coincidence. How many deaths and accidents have you dreamed about that didn't come true? Though it may seem unbelievable at the time, mathematically it is commonplace.

3) It's also quite likely that "psychic" information is received subconsciously. In other words, if you know your friend is a risk-taker behind the wheel, it's not psychic to dream of him having a car accident which later happens.

There is a scientific principle known as Occam's Razor, where the simplest, most likely solution is always the best. There's no need to call upon "magic" when we can explain the so-called phenomena logically. Reason dictates we ditch the unproven theories and accept the simplest proven explanation.

Of course, if real, repeatable evidence emerged for psychic dreams, I would accept them to be real! Seriously, it would blow my mind. Lucid dreamers are best poised to take on this task, as explained in my article on precognitive dreams. Until such time, I'm going to base my beliefs on observed truths and rational reasoning.

As a general response, I'd just like to say it does seem a bit dogmatic of you to say my opinion is "simply not true", as Rothgar points out!! That seems a very closed-minded way to open a debate.

I know my world view conflicts with yours, but do allow me to explain why I say these things:

The main reason I feel psychic, telepathic or third-party healing dreams do not take place is for lack of scientific, repeatable evidence. Your personal experience is, alas, not scientific.

It MIGHT be that you are psychic and your interpretation of events is correct, but also you have to admit that it MIGHT NOT. So, do we educate our audiences with the KNOWNS -- or UNKNOWNS?

I choose the former. You have chosen the latter.

My point is that, depending on your exact claim (which I would like to hear and we can have a full and open discussion about it), we can probably find alternative explanations for what happened based on known facts. We do not need to fall back on "unknowns" - ie psychic explanations.

Please bear in mind, the scientific approach is open-minded and doesn't jump to any conclusions. It assumes a sensible, rational, default position on all things unexplained, until we can explain them.

That's why I say the things I do on my website. Because it would be wrong of me to use my website as a platform for telling people they can heal their terminal illness, win lotto or talk to deceased relatives using their lucid dreams, when I can't provide hard evidence for it.

And by hard evidence, I mean repeatable, wide-scale experiments. Personal experience is brilliant and can be used as a tool for self development, but also remember the human mind can be fooled sometimes.

I can even fool myself - neither of us are foolproof! Which is why I have great respect for the scientific method with its testability and objectivity and apply its logic to the things I write on my website.

Also Maria, I just read your blog post "Healing My Tendonitis in Lucid Dreams". Good job. I too have attempted to heal myself in my lucid dreams over the years... mainly by focusing energy at the injury or asking my dream directly to cure me. Sadly it was always without success.

Still, I find this one of the most intriguing potential applications for lucid dreaming. However due to my lack of experience and the lack of scientific evidence, I don't give it any real coverage on my website. To do so would be really quite speculative on my part. I have written a short article highlighting Robert Waggoner's research into lucid dream healing, as he is currently a leading experimenter in this field. I hasten to add that his evidence is also only anecdotal at this stage:

http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/lucid-dream-healing.html

Though I'm not aware of any clinical studies into lucid dream healing (and this is really the way to prove it actually works, once and for all) scientific research has revealed that the mind CAN sometimes influence the physical body, in certain circumstances, via The Placebo Effect.

The theory behind it is that, where our belief that we can heal is so strong, we experience some physical recovery without medicine. There are some things the mind has not been shown to cure - a reduction in a brain tumour, for instance - but some simpler conditions which it has - such as reduction in chronic pain.

We need only take a sugar pill we believe is an active drug, have a so-called healing dream, or simply meditate on the prospect of recovery to plausibly see some effect (even though those effects can still be unreliable and random). If we truly expect to see an improvement or reduction in pain, the mind can influence the body. It is not caused by magical dream energy, though, if that's where you're going.... It is a psychological phenomenon that has been observed again and again in clinical trials, without healing dreams playing any kind of role. This is a "known".

In your tendonitis story, you could have been given a placebo cortisone shot and experienced a similar placebo effect (reduced pain, greater movement). You could achieve the same effect with hypnosis (Derren Brown, for example, demonstrates on his TV shows how hypnotized subjects become completely numb to pain at his suggestion). It could even have been that your wonderful lucid dreams caused sufficient euphoria and reduction in your day-to-day stress levels that you were able to heal faster (stress is a BIG factor in recovering from illness). It's all using the same principle of mind over matter.

So... the mind is powerful, and we have seen how it can influence the physical body. But we must stick to what we know and understand without jumping to conclusions. I suspect, from reading your comment and blog posts, that you believe the healing came from psychic energy and have now woven this into your belief system. However, it is more accurate to say it was a physical mind-body interaction - one that, with study, we will come to understand fully. This is scientific progress.

Incidentally, this logic is also why I don't put the potential for self healing dreams in the same category as telepathic dreaming, psychically dreaming of the deceased, or healing other people via my dreams. Unlike the Placebo Effect, there is no mechanism identified for any of these to work. It feels like a diversion off track into the land of make believe, when we could be really onto something with the mind-healing-dreams, even if successful results are only sporadic.

Which leads me to one final point: why it is dangerous, at this early stage of experimentation, to propagate the belief as fact that you can heal yourself via your lucid dreams. Even the prescription of placebo pills is considered unethical (and illegal, outside of lab research) in the UK, because the effects are unreliable and unpredictable. They also involve some level of doctor-patient dishonesty because the doctor must convince the patient he's taking an active drug that is proven to work.

So by telling your audience that you know it be to "fact" that they can heal themselves via their dreams, you are being unethical, promising a cure where the truth is your cure is not tested nor proven. If someone stopped taking their meds because of your advice, and ended up in more pain and suffering and possibly even death - would you still feel you are being so helpful?